Find out what's happening behind the scenes in the organisation that maintains Scotland's land and property registers.

Message from the Keeper: November 2018

It’s been a real highlight getting to meet a wide range of stakeholders over the past few months, and November provided a number of opportunities to continue this.

But first, I’d like to share some important business news, as 30 November marked the official retirement of Registers Direct, our legacy land information service. Many of you have been working closely with our customer relationship managers over the past months to make the move to ScotLIS, and I also know that the ScotLIS team are enthusiastic to continue building on the service’s excellent existing features in future, based on your feedback.

Readers of my last message will know I finished October attending the Registrars of Title Conference in Australia. The event was three fascinating days of presentations from delegates representing countries around the world, as well as the opportunity to learn new ideas and best practice, which I look forward to sharing with customers and colleagues.

My travels continued once I returned to Scotland, with several further dates in diary for our autumn campaign of customer engagement. This month I met with stakeholders at workshops in Castle Douglas, Inverness, Aberdeen, Stirling and Dundee. I’d like to thank everyone who attended, from local legal professionals to representatives from the Law Society of Scotland – each of the events generated interesting discussion around land registration, our products and services, and current service standards, all of which provided invaluable insight.

There were further conferences after ROTC too. I attended and spoke at the Scottish Official Statistics Conference, where we shared the contribution of our Information and Analysis team and the important work they do to land and property data in Scotland. I particularly enjoyed the inspiring talk from Data Labs Scotland, which shared the benefits delivered by the effective use of data and analysis.

I was also honoured to be the keynote speaker at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) conference in Edinburgh. I always enjoy events such as this because they provide a great channel for conversation about a variety of topics with a variety of customers and stakeholders. Thank you to RICS for inviting me to speak.

And finally, I attended the Five Registries Conference in London and met with representatives from the land registries in England and Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man, to share where our work has common ground and what we can learn from each other.

Overall, November was a busy, positive month and as we near the end of 2018, a fantastic opportunity to continue meeting with our customers before the run-up to the festive season. Thank you again to all those who met with my colleagues and I in the past month, and I’m looking forward to future opportunities in the months to come.